Lucky by Jenn Horwath
2023 Honourable Mention
Your daughter is in awe of the night sky. It’s like a gift—this sparkling show of stars, a wash of milky white and endless glowing orbs of light—just for her. Here in the camp, amid the mud, the stench of urine, body odour, and rotting fruit, the constant drone of half-dead flies and exhausted moaning, looking skyward at this silent, otherworldly splendour offers a sense of hope, that there truly is a better place.
“You were right,” you say to your wife silently, and remember the night she gave your daughter the sky chart she now clutches. A token from another time, passed down by careful hands from generation to generation, it was a device to steer ships by; an iron ring the size of a fist with a movable insert that decrypted the night sky’s jumble of stars into tidy constellations.
Arms wrapped around Charlotte, she gently guided Charlotte’s hands to position the chart. “See, there’s the North Star at the top of Ursa Minor. When you see it in the sky, it may look like one single star but really there are three, all tightly orbiting around each other, just like us three, always together. You’ll be amazed when you see it.” Charlotte, puzzled, gazed upward at a sky dead in its utter emptiness, and wondered what a star was.
Here of all places, the sky has cleared, revealing her stash of treasures that has been concealed for most of Charlotte’s life. And just as Jess had predicted, Charlotte is mesmerized. It’s surely a sign.
Charlotte shifts the inner ring of the chart, as you hold the flashlight.
“There it is,” she says, pointing skyward. “The North Star. Just like Mom said.”
You hug her closer. The North Star: “guide for travellers,” your wife had said. “Earth’s natural compass.” But it’s been hiding during your entire long journey, the night skies swollen with clouds or splitting with rain.
Your daughter falls asleep, the chart released from her grip, and you listen for her gentle breaths. Your backpacks are tied to you with bungee cords and you shift to get comfortable, straining to slip the sky chart into her bag.
“Good night, Jess,” you say to your wife, even though you know she can’t hear you.
The next day, you complete the application for the Safe Sector: a set of gruelling tests. You feel violated, as if every bit of you and Charlotte has been extracted—your blood, your urine, your thoughts, your dreams. You pay the remainder of the application fee—almost your entire life’s savings. A huge gamble but worth it, you and Jess had decided.
You are nervous about the results: Charlotte is weak from the journey and has a slight nagging cough probably picked up during the damp nights sleeping outdoors. She is twitchy, like a small, hunted rodent. You are relieved when you hear you’ve both passed the tests for entry.
“Now we just wait and hope,” you say to Charlotte as you walk through the camp, her hand in yours, the wet mud clutching at the bottoms of your worn shoes, pulling you into the earth. You’ve never been lucky with lotteries. You hope this time will be different.
“We’ve done all we can and now we must be patient,” you tell yourself over and over, when you wake in the frigid night. You repeat the word “patient” as if it is a mantra, until it reminds you of Jess, wasting into mere bones in her hospital bed, and doubt and grief gnaw your resolve like insistent rats.
When you hear that you and Charlotte have been selected, you are careful to hide your elation, mindful of the poor souls stuck in this camp at the edge of nowhere who may never afford the application fee, let alone have their numbers called. You pull Charlotte in tightly, crying into her hair, unable to believe your luck. You can at last leave your tattered tent that has been home for the past several weeks. You pack your scant belongings in your backpacks, Charlotte careful to stash the sky chart deep inside an inner pocket.
Once inside the Safe Sector, it’s as if you’ve sprouted new eyes: sunlight hovers on the edge of every leaf and branch, creating colours you forgot existed. The air is not singed with the stench of rot and burning, and instead carries scents of pine and wildflowers. Distant from the blackened scars and hollowed out wounds from fires and floods, the earth is unscathed here, pulsing with fresh, green life.
They show you to your hut at the edge of the forest. It’s just big enough for the two of you and has a small garden in the back for growing vegetables, bordered by fruit trees, heavy with blossoms. Everyone is responsible for growing their own food, you are told. People’s voices here are syrupy and calm, like the gentle hush of the wind through poplars; there is none of the knife edge crazed desperation like on The Outside. You feel you can trust people for the first time in a long time, they won’t steal your belongings while you are sleeping—this is the land of sustenance, happiness.
But a few weeks later, you notice Charlotte is still fidgety and talks to herself in a low voice, her brow knit in concentration. She chews her nails until her fingers are bloody and raw.
“When will Mom come?” she asks for the hundredth time as you walk back from the weekly communal gathering.
“When she is well enough,” you lie. “Don’t worry, okay?” You are finding the need to lie grates on your soul, shredding you with each telling.
Jess’s grey eyes locked with yours as she held your hand.
“Wait to tell Charlotte until she’s settled there. She’ll realize how lucky she is that she’s safe. She’ll understand why we didn’t tell her.” Her voice faint, she tried with every last strand of strength to convince you. What made her think this would be simple?
“How much guilt should I feel?”
This new question startles you from your reverie, and you stop walking. Then you remember—the sermon at the gathering, the preacher’s exhortation to be thankful, and to never forget the others on The Outside and their suffering.
“It’s not so much guilt as being grateful for what you have,” you try to explain. “But what about the others? On The Outside? And in the camp?”
“Yes, you shouldn’t forget them.” You know your answer is feeble, but how to answer such a question?
“Should I never feel happy?”
You lean down so your eyes are level with hers. “You should always be happy.”
You say it like it is a command, a rule she must follow. She seems to slump under the weight of it.
“Maybe when Mom gets here.”
Looking skyward, you see a vulture circling, black wings cutting the sky with wide spirals, and you tell yourself it’s not a sign.
On the evening you’ve chosen, Charlotte is sitting on the front stoop, humming the song your wife taught her long ago: “When you wish upon a star.” The song sounds haunted in her young voice and not like the soothing lullaby it was when your wife sang it.
“Hey you,” you say, sitting alongside her and following her gaze to the sky. There are not many stars tonight—a few lonely flickers here and there, but the night is alive with a chorus of toads and cicadas and its humid breath smells of lilac.
You hate to break this moment, perhaps the last time she will trust you.
“Listen, sweetheart…I have something to tell you.”
She is nervous, biting her bottom lip.
“It’s about Mom.”
“She’s coming, right?”
“Sometimes we do things and it seems wrong, cruel even. But it’s not. It’s done out of love.”
She tilts her head, her eyes question marks.
Your Mom...you know, she was very sick. She wanted to come here but she knew—”
“My teacher said that they don’t let sick people in here. Is that true?”
Her interruption is blunt, a boot to the heart.
“Well, yes, but—”
“So Mom could never come here?”
The conversation is not going as you had planned at all.
“Well, as I said, when she’s well enough—”
“But she’ll never be well enough. You lied to me! You told me she was coming. Why did you say she was coming?”
“Your mother loves you very much. She wanted you to be here. To be happy. And safe.”
“Why did you make me leave her?”
“Sweetie, listen…” You try to grasp her wrist as she struggles to stand.
“No, you lied. You lied to me,” she shrieks, becoming some child you’ve never seen before.
It’s a few days later when you see she has run away. In her sparse room, she doesn’t have many belongings so it’s easy to see she’s taken her backpack and the sky chart and the few sweaters and pants she owns.
You should have told her sooner. You should have known better. But she never would have come. She can’t get far, you assure yourself, as you make your way to the Police Station. She will likely have forgotten the chip that was embedded in those early, chaotic days of arrival. She will have forgotten being told that there is no escape from here.
At the Police Station, you report her missing and they show you where she is on a map: a white dot moving slowly across a black screen, like a sad, lost star spun out of its orbit.
After she is found, you have time together in the cramped interrogation room that reeks of cleaning solution and fits only a metal table and two hard, plastic chairs. Explaining again that you and Jess both decided this was for the best is pointless and weak against her wall of rage and tears. She clutches the sky chart and shakes it at you.
“She gave this to me for a reason. So I could find her. So I could find my way back.”
You try to explain that outside of here, the sky chart is useless, there are few stars to navigate by, it’s just a beautiful but hopeless remnant of another time.
“You just wanted to save yourself,” she says, her voice low and unsettling in its sudden calmness, like a quick, sharp blade across the skin. “That’s why we came here.”
“That’s not true. We came here for you, sweetie, for you.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t believe you. And what about all the people we saw on the way here? And in the camp? Will they ever get in?”
You take a deep breath, looking up at the pulsing fluorescent lights that burn into your eyes. “Your mom didn’t have much time left. A month, maybe two. And we needed to leave then, it was our only chance, before the winter storms started. It was our only chance. Please, Charlotte, you have to believe me. This was your mother’s decision as much as mine.”
She stands and leaves the room, slamming the door. She’ll understand eventually; once her hurt has formed a hard, bitter core, a black hole at the centre of her being. She’ll realize this was for the best and how lucky she is. You tell yourself this as you both walk back home, her ahead, keeping her distance. You want to talk to Jess in your head again, but no words come and you know she can’t hear you anyway. Above, the stars are a mess of tangled light, splattered across the sky, oblivious observers that taunt you with their brilliance, while the wind makes the North Star flicker like a failing bulb.
Jenn Horwath is a librarian with a penchant for cats, cardigans, comfy shoes and alliteration. She has published in academic journals and is excited to be exploring the much juicier creative side of writing. A proud Hamiltonian, she is thrilled to be participating in gritLIT 2023.